Imma cheap and dirty whore… thanks to World of Warcraft.

That’s right. A whore. I call myself that because I thought I would never again go back to the shit-fest that was online-play-with-complete-strangers-who-don’t-care. It just feels cheap to be at it again boy I tell ya. Like a guilty pleasure, Blizzard Entertainment’s cash cow World of Warcraft (WoW) has once again filled a part of me that had in the past, satisfied a need to excel at something and be the best at it. But isn’t that why we play computers games anyways? More on that in future BLOGs.

After a year’s hiatus from the game that I devoted a massive share of my online life to since 2006, I re-activated my account and dusted off the cobwebs in my brain to recall how to play my nine characters. Yeah, that’s right, nine different toons in WoW. Hey! What can I say? I was a chronic WoW player. These nine characters are Xatrixius, a level 85 Holy/Retribution Paladin, Claevius, a level 73 Protection Warrior, Malaevius, a level 85 Marksman/Survival Hunter, Benedictius a level 85 Holy/Shadow Priest, Octaevius, a level 85 Destruction Warlock, Quaesius, a level 82 Fire Mage, Arthasius, a level 85 Blood/Frost Death Knight, Bovarius, a level 74 Feral Druid and finally Dantavius, a level 14 Combat Rogue. WHEW! I must admit, it is mind boggling to think that I actually leveled up ALL of those toons to mostly level 85 although of course there are a couple that are quite low still. Talk about Obsessive Compulsive Disorder eh? Damn!

Anyways, during that time I had been playing RIFT, another awesome Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) that caught my attention during its own launch about a year ago. I was taken immediately with RIFT in the same fashion that I was immediately taken with WoW. RIFT has been largely described as WoW 2.0. And it really was, it was almost as if someone had stolen the source code to WoW, given it a huge graphics upgrade, taken out all the crap that was in WoW (yes, there were bad elements in that almost-perfect game), gave the concept a massive overhaul and then called it RIFT. But alas, there weren’t enough dedicated players on my server (and two others) to create a consistent raiding team to raid in RIFT. Partly because RIFT made it too easy for players to transfer servers; it was free and immediate. If you didn’t like the population on one server then move! Why not? Of course everyone and his dog did the same thing and pretty soon even the populated servers became ghost towns. So much for raiding, which is the thing that happens after you max out your characters levels, in this case for RIFT, level 50.

Which brings me back to WoW. Of course, I’m in a guild that is at least level 25 although raiding may not be an option. We’ll see. It was good though to see old friends that were still playing the game. My friends list after 5 years of playing got to be pretty huge and most were still playing WoW. To my surprise though the Deathwing encounter has been released as well as some new Heroics in the Hour Of Twilight patch that are pretty fun to play. A new transmorgrification option exists now so that you can make your armour and weapons look like other, kewler looking armour and weapons for a hefty gold fee. An ingenious option although, in my opinion, this represents the bastardization of the game in order to simply please the masses in a shameless corporate way. A new Void bank allows you to store even more useless shit, but there are far too many restrictions to make it worth anyone’s while. Enchants and gems are stripped, and a fee for every single item stored I thought was yet another shameless, corporate money grab to make players spend even more time that they shouldn’t need to, in order to build up the massive amount of gold you’ll need to even use the Void banks. Disgusting.

It’s interesting though in a final note, to see that Blizzard didn’t learn a damn thing from the very reason that caused me and about 1.2 million players to leave the game in 2011 in pursuit of something else. The healing mechanics. Healing was an enormous bitch to work through because it put so much pressure on healers to heal any group in a heroic or even a raid. Haste was destroyed, mana pools was destroyed, healing spell costs were jacked up friggin’ sky high and mana regen (mana-per-5 seconds or MP5) was pathetic. The game had become needlessly irritating and painful in some cases because healers became the bitches of WoW. In that, healers were constantly barking at other players to “stop-standing-in-the-fire” (a cliche in WoW), to use more crowd control (CC) and we were constantly pissing on tanks for not having the proper gear/spec for tanking.

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The stink from the players got so high that Ghostcrawler, the head honcho Dev at Blizzard, released a patch that gave us all a “buff” as soon as we walked into any Heroic to “help” us with higher stats to our characters. Was that supposed to help or piss us all off? Christ, he even released an entry into the WoW Forums with the headline “WoW! Dungeons are hard!” The reaction was resonating and immediate. Bye bye asshole Dev! Hello RIFT! (or whatever your chosen MMO replacement was) And with that approx. 1.1 million players made it clear to Ghostcrawler and every other prick at Blizz that we weren’t happy with his attitude OR the fucking over that WoW received since the Wrath of the Lich King expansion.

That was also part of the problem. Wrath was such a huge success that Blizz enjoyed the highest number of players to ever be playing a single game at any given moment. At its peak, during Wrath in 2010, WoW had 12 million players playing every single day, or at least every week. Just to give you an idea, that’s approx. $156,000,000 that Blizz was raking in every single month! 12 million * $13 a month. When WoW lost approx. 1.1 million players over the course of 2011, that was a financial hit of approx. $15,000,000 per month! So what was Blizz’s response? They laid off 150 software engineers and their press core was working overtime trying to find a reason to bring back such a huge amount of money. And what was Blizz’s long term plan? Push the release of the Deathwing (the big bad-ass of the Cataclysm expansion pack) encounter and announce the next expansion pack concept; Mist of Pandaria. In a word? PATHETIC. Pandas as our next character type? Someone punch me in the face. There is nothing cool about Pandas, least of all to make them some sort of monk-like copy with lame-ass and literal hand-to-hand combat abilities.

Some think that Blizz is going for broke and trying to romance China into allowing WoW back into their borders by appeasing the giant that is China with something that resembles their culture type. Pandas AND martial arts? How could anyone NOT see this as nothing more than a desperate money grab. Just think, another billion players to add to Blizz’s roster of money sucked fools all paying their $13 a month too hmmmmm?

So much for the love of the game. And Blizz had the gaming formula down so well. Fun heroics, WITH challenging achievements, same for raids, variety, quick raiding that was Trial of the Champion (ToC), and did I mention F-U-N? All that was pissed out the window when Cataclysm hit.

Time will tell I guess. WoW has been a fixation and will be again, but this time we’re gonna keep a lip on the OCD and play the game again because it’s fun, not because I need a fix… or something like that.